Obama's failed presidency

Kyle Smith:

The closing arguments for the Obama years are arriving, and they aren’t helping the outgoing president. A case in point is a new book published this week, one that acknowledges “Obama’s supporters have experienced [his presidency] as a continuous disappointment.”

Those supporters, and others, must have noticed that “for most of Obama’s term, wage gains were largely confined to the rich.” Or that “The administration’s planning in Libya clearly failed” or “It is certain that the actual outcome [of Obama’s Syria policy] was disastrous.”

Even many of President Obama’s proudest achievements look about as enduring as April snow: “If there was a single aspect of Obama’s legacy most vulnerable to reversal, it was his achievements on climate change,” the book says, and “Obama’s regulatory offensive is, of course, vulnerable to reversal by Donald Trump or the Supreme Court, since it rested upon executive action.” The longest chapter is titled “The Inevitability of Disappointment.”

Yet the title of the book containing these quotations is “Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail,” by the New York magazine columnist and lefty firebrand Jonathan Chait.

Sustained coherence seems to elude the author. On Page 99 we hear about those “overblown or even false claims that the new law [ObamaCare] was raising premiums,” but three pages later we learn, “Big insurers like Aetna pulled out of the exchanges, reducing options, and insurers in most markets raised their premiums.” Oh. Republican opposition, which boils down to wariness of new spending while Obama is racking up more debt than the previous 43 presidents combined, doesn’t earn a rational counter-argument.

No, the GOP simply means “rage.” “Republican terror,” Chait writes, is “berserk” with a “fierce and even crazed tone” (this last describes Paul Ryan).

On Page 31, Chait declares “the simplistic initial hope of Obama’s giddy supporters that the symbolism of a black president could help heal, if not eliminate, racial prejudice turned out to have a real basis in fact.” But 20 pages back, he comes to the opposite conclusion: “racism continues to lurk deep in the American psyche,” “Americans had split once again into mutually uncomprehending racial camps,” “the continued existence of racism in American life has been confirmed by a library of social-science research.”
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Obama lurched from one strategic blunder to the next throughout his administration.  He started with a build-up of troops in Afghanistan and immediately made the grievous error of telling the enemy when the surge would end and the troops brought home thus telling them how long they had to wait him out. 

His retreat of Iraq led to a genocide perpetrated by ISIS which he compounded by having amateurs in the White House have to approve any military response to the genocide thus prolonging the agony of those caught in the maelstrom he allowed to happen. 

In Libya, he had no plan for dealing with the aftermath of toppling the government resulting in terrorist taking over the weapons and using them to fight elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East.  He failed to provide security for the US ambassador sent to Libya and also failed to respond to the attacks on his compound. 

His dealing with Russia involved selling them US uranium and setting up a system that allowed them to become more proficient in cyber warfare.

He was one of the most arrogantly ignorant people to ever hold the job.